Traditional outbound marketing has been a staple in our industry for more than 100 years. Yet, newspaper, radio, television and billboards continue to lose their impact on the automotive shoppers’ decision-making process. It can be said that disruptive and invasive advertising is dead, but the body just doesn’t stink enough yet.

Today, let’s discuss the future of automotive retail success, inbound marketing, and the power of drawing people to you. Have you used Google to find something you were looking for in the past month (maybe a local restaurant, business address, retail shop or product information)? Yes? So did almost every other person on the planet.

Have you ever crowd-sourced something on Facebook or Twitter? Crowd-sourcing can take the form of a question: “I am in San Diego. Does anyone know a good place to eat?” If you have a good network of people, this can be an incredibly powerful way to find out something from the people you trust. People do this every day and it is fast becoming the new normal for how we research and make decisions through our trusted network of friends.

The common thread between these two new types of research and decision-making scenarios is that they both start with shoppers using the Internet to research a question. They seek out the answers themselves instead of the message being thrust upon them. Second, they will likely make a purchase decision now based upon a combination of what they have self-discovered through search and friend or consumer recommendations online. This is the core of inbound marketing — the creation of content that consumers will search for and use to influence their purchase decision.

I completed an example of this just last week. I searched on Google: “How much is a Toyota Prius?” I figured many shoppers would ask a question like this one. It turns out that 1,300 Google users per month type the same thing in the search box in Orlando alone. Now, the fact that not one dealership created the content that would be optimized for this results page was very disappointing. There were paid advertisers on the page, but ads are only so effective. What I am talking about is influencing the shoppers who see your content month after month to help them craft their decision to buy.

If a Toyota dealership wrote a short blog post about this, they could easily rank at the top of this Google search results page and potentially drive thousand of interested Toyota Prius shoppers into their showroom. Yet, no one is doing that. Instead they are paying to shout disruptive advertising messages to deaf ears.

What is wrong with this picture? Find out in next month’s issue where I will describe how you can make an inbound marketing strategy the single largest driver of new business for your dealership.